Happy Easter my friends,
Here is Verse 13 of the Tao Te Ching.
Verse 13 - Identity
Accolades can usher in
great trouble for your body.
Censure can herald misery.
Why can favour and disfavour
both be harmful?
Because both accolades and censure,
when filtered through self as ego,
always place us in jeopardy.
But when the universe becomes your self,
when you love the world as yourself,
all reality becomes your haven,
reinventing you as your own heaven.
Only then, will you transcend tense
to fully be here now.
Only then, no harm
will the universe proffer
nor you to her,
for you will be
not you but she
and both – the universal Great Integrity. (Translation Ralph Alan Dale)
This is the longest verse we have looked at so far, but is probably one of the most straightforward.
It tells us that as long as we focus on the ego then we will find the world a hard place to live in. When we spend our lives trying to win approval at all times we lose our sense of self and just become what we think everyone else wants us to be – thus becoming nobody.
We are all behaving (or have behaved at some point in our lives) in a way that fits in with society. We find praise and so seek for more. We find censure and fall into despair. Abraham Lincoln said: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’ This is very true and if we replace the word ‘fool’ with ‘please’ then we begin to have a formula for living our daily lives. It is not possible to please everyone all the time and we only make our own existence painful and futile by trying – especially if we please people rather than living by our own truths and principles.
In point of fact who do we decide who we want to please? Whose criticism of our lives, good and bad, do we want to take on board? About some people we say that we couldn’t care less what they think and others over whom we die thousands of tiny deaths every time they seem to be displeased by something we have done. We allow our relationships to have such a huge effect on our daily life, compromising them to ridiculous degrees. When we feel the relationships with those we are close to are going well then we respond well in the rest of our lives. If we feel that the relationships are falling apart and that we are being misjudged we allow our worlds to fall apart around us. Daisaku Ikeda says: ‘Happiness is not something that someone else, like a lover, can give to us. We have to achieve it for ourselves.’ That is not to say that we should not seek relationships, it is just that healthy relationships do not stem from relinquishing our own identities for the sake of pleasing another. We have to make ourselves happy first and only then do we have the independence and the security to make a relationship in which both parties can be happy without any self-sacrifice. So often we see relationships where one partner gives up everything just to make the other happy. This is not an equal relationship - this is slavery. Both parties deserve equal happiness and you can only achieve this by being two independent beings who are happily sharing your existence without depending solely on the other’s praise for your happiness.
The concept of Oneness, or Esho Funi (the oneness of self and environment) very much comes into play in the stanza: ‘when the universe becomes yourself ... all reality becomes your haven.’ We currently live in a world of such separation, only seeking approbation from those people who are in ‘our gang’, and only giving it to people who we feel are ‘our type of people’. When Rutherford discovered what atoms were made of he opened the way that would eventually lead to Quantum Physics as we know it today. It is now recorded fact that we are made of exactly – and I mean exactly – the same molecules as everything in the universe, from the most distant stars to the chair on which I sit as I write this. How then is separation possible? How can we not all be in this together? How can any one of us be worth more than another? And yet this is very much the case. A Western life is worth very much more than that of someone born in the Third World. In the atrocities of September 11th approximately 6000 people died. This is appalling. I am not trying to say that it is not, all violence is appalling. However, what is equally appalling is that 6000 children a day were dying at this time of malnutrition in developing countries, because their parents had to work to provide the west with luxury items, whilst not even being paid enough to provide their own children with the basics. Their lives were of no interest to anyone and so were worth far less that the lives of 6000 Americans for whom many more thousands of people were to die over the next decade as they were avenged. This is separation at its worst.
I am not suggesting that we lose our individuality. The concept of funi is that we are two but not two; as the concept of Oneness is that we are all blossoms on the World Tree. We need to be independent and totally ourselves, whilst contributing to the whole of mankind and the earth. We need to use our natural instinct for fairness, or for what we feel to be right, as a gauge against which to measure our behaviour. How many of us have sneered at teenagers who give into peer pressure and end up doing something silly. ‘If they told you to jump off a cliff’ we jibe ‘would you do it?’ And yet on a far bigger scale this is exactly what we do every day. This is how vigilantism starts and how wars begin. We go along with the majority view because we are scared. Conscientious Objectors often show far more bravery than those who go out to fight because it takes much more courage to stand up to your friends than it does to your enemies. The people who you have grown up with now throw back at you: ‘you are not one of us anymore’. You are ostracised. It takes a very strong person to withstand that, to stick with their principles and not join in the killing of people whose only crime is being born in a country where there is a cruel regime, or because their skin colour or religion is different. How are these reasons to kill anyone?
So, this is what we need to aim for – being true to ourselves at all times. As the fabulous peace activist Dick Sheppard used to say in the 1930s: ‘it is not peace at any price, but love at all costs’. This may seem a small difference, but think on it a while and you will see there is a vast chasm between the two. Only when we manage to be true to ourselves will we find ourselves merging with ‘the universal Great Integrity’.
Here is Verse 13 of the Tao Te Ching.
Verse 13 - Identity
Accolades can usher in
great trouble for your body.
Censure can herald misery.
Why can favour and disfavour
both be harmful?
Because both accolades and censure,
when filtered through self as ego,
always place us in jeopardy.
But when the universe becomes your self,
when you love the world as yourself,
all reality becomes your haven,
reinventing you as your own heaven.
Only then, will you transcend tense
to fully be here now.
Only then, no harm
will the universe proffer
nor you to her,
for you will be
not you but she
and both – the universal Great Integrity. (Translation Ralph Alan Dale)
This is the longest verse we have looked at so far, but is probably one of the most straightforward.
It tells us that as long as we focus on the ego then we will find the world a hard place to live in. When we spend our lives trying to win approval at all times we lose our sense of self and just become what we think everyone else wants us to be – thus becoming nobody.
We are all behaving (or have behaved at some point in our lives) in a way that fits in with society. We find praise and so seek for more. We find censure and fall into despair. Abraham Lincoln said: ‘You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.’ This is very true and if we replace the word ‘fool’ with ‘please’ then we begin to have a formula for living our daily lives. It is not possible to please everyone all the time and we only make our own existence painful and futile by trying – especially if we please people rather than living by our own truths and principles.
In point of fact who do we decide who we want to please? Whose criticism of our lives, good and bad, do we want to take on board? About some people we say that we couldn’t care less what they think and others over whom we die thousands of tiny deaths every time they seem to be displeased by something we have done. We allow our relationships to have such a huge effect on our daily life, compromising them to ridiculous degrees. When we feel the relationships with those we are close to are going well then we respond well in the rest of our lives. If we feel that the relationships are falling apart and that we are being misjudged we allow our worlds to fall apart around us. Daisaku Ikeda says: ‘Happiness is not something that someone else, like a lover, can give to us. We have to achieve it for ourselves.’ That is not to say that we should not seek relationships, it is just that healthy relationships do not stem from relinquishing our own identities for the sake of pleasing another. We have to make ourselves happy first and only then do we have the independence and the security to make a relationship in which both parties can be happy without any self-sacrifice. So often we see relationships where one partner gives up everything just to make the other happy. This is not an equal relationship - this is slavery. Both parties deserve equal happiness and you can only achieve this by being two independent beings who are happily sharing your existence without depending solely on the other’s praise for your happiness.
The concept of Oneness, or Esho Funi (the oneness of self and environment) very much comes into play in the stanza: ‘when the universe becomes yourself ... all reality becomes your haven.’ We currently live in a world of such separation, only seeking approbation from those people who are in ‘our gang’, and only giving it to people who we feel are ‘our type of people’. When Rutherford discovered what atoms were made of he opened the way that would eventually lead to Quantum Physics as we know it today. It is now recorded fact that we are made of exactly – and I mean exactly – the same molecules as everything in the universe, from the most distant stars to the chair on which I sit as I write this. How then is separation possible? How can we not all be in this together? How can any one of us be worth more than another? And yet this is very much the case. A Western life is worth very much more than that of someone born in the Third World. In the atrocities of September 11th approximately 6000 people died. This is appalling. I am not trying to say that it is not, all violence is appalling. However, what is equally appalling is that 6000 children a day were dying at this time of malnutrition in developing countries, because their parents had to work to provide the west with luxury items, whilst not even being paid enough to provide their own children with the basics. Their lives were of no interest to anyone and so were worth far less that the lives of 6000 Americans for whom many more thousands of people were to die over the next decade as they were avenged. This is separation at its worst.
I am not suggesting that we lose our individuality. The concept of funi is that we are two but not two; as the concept of Oneness is that we are all blossoms on the World Tree. We need to be independent and totally ourselves, whilst contributing to the whole of mankind and the earth. We need to use our natural instinct for fairness, or for what we feel to be right, as a gauge against which to measure our behaviour. How many of us have sneered at teenagers who give into peer pressure and end up doing something silly. ‘If they told you to jump off a cliff’ we jibe ‘would you do it?’ And yet on a far bigger scale this is exactly what we do every day. This is how vigilantism starts and how wars begin. We go along with the majority view because we are scared. Conscientious Objectors often show far more bravery than those who go out to fight because it takes much more courage to stand up to your friends than it does to your enemies. The people who you have grown up with now throw back at you: ‘you are not one of us anymore’. You are ostracised. It takes a very strong person to withstand that, to stick with their principles and not join in the killing of people whose only crime is being born in a country where there is a cruel regime, or because their skin colour or religion is different. How are these reasons to kill anyone?
So, this is what we need to aim for – being true to ourselves at all times. As the fabulous peace activist Dick Sheppard used to say in the 1930s: ‘it is not peace at any price, but love at all costs’. This may seem a small difference, but think on it a while and you will see there is a vast chasm between the two. Only when we manage to be true to ourselves will we find ourselves merging with ‘the universal Great Integrity’.
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